Project Doctor
By combining a thorough strategic assessment with ongoing monitoring and coaching, Prevoyance Group's Project Doctor provides crucial insight and guidance to avoid implementation pitfalls, and reduce spending on existing problematic implementations. Delivering successful strategic IT projects is a huge undertaking, with millions of dollars at stake and key employees diverted from their regular responsibilities. Competitors may steal market share while you focus internally, or opportunities will be missed while your company concentrates on itself, rather than on the customer. Large-scale IT implementations have hundreds of junctures where improper planning or communication can add hundreds of hours and millions of dollars to the cost of completion. Knowing that only a few of these junctures need to be overlooked and it will adversely affect the outcome of the entire implementation, a company cannot afford the increasing amounts of lost time and money required to repair late in the project timeline.
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A key component to successfully delivering any project is determining the right mix of the “Three Levers:” scope, cost and timeline. Any two of the levers can be controlled by the project, leaving the third to move in concert with the other two. For example, if timeline and cost are critical factors to an implementation, the amount of scope that can be implemented becomes smaller as emphasis is shifted to cost and timeline, as pictured in the figures to the right.
Many implementation providers promise control of all three levers, claiming to be able to deliver the impossible: large, complex scope at low cost with a rapid implementation timeframe. This rapid timeframe necessitates an extremely quick project ramp-up and requirements gathering, often barely scratching the surface of the various issues facing a project. Rather than focusing on and fixing business processes, these implementations attempt to paste software over bad processes; a band aid over a bleeding artery.
These problems are glossed over in the zeal to complete the requirements gathering and design phase of the project, and often only discovered during the later testing phases, when cost to fix is significantly higher, and project dates impacted far more greatly than had appropriate diligence been spent in the design phase. With go-live dates looming, there is a feeling that it is too late to do a comprehensive redesign, and more proverbial fingers are used to plug leaks in the dam. Implementation “partners” have little incentive to pause the project and develop a plan for corrective action, as stretching timelines equate to more billable hours and higher profits.
Prevoyance Group acts as a “Project Doctor,” seeking to balance the three levers in the optimum manner for your organization. We work with your company to provide a comprehensive suite of “preventative medicine” early in the implementation process, preferably during software and implementation vendor selection where we can help you cut through the sales pitch and determine what will actually work for your company, budget and timeline. We also successfully apply these services to existing projects, helping you spot and correct potential trouble, or providing assurance that project dollars are being well spent.
Applying Prevoyance Group's StrategicIT Services to an individual project, Project Doctor institutes tools to prevent, correct and monitor your project, with quantifiable results such as:
Comprehensive project cost determination: The impact of project decisions can not be accurately assessed until the costs of each decision are known. A full understanding of project costs provides an accurate determination of ROI for a given decision.
Project planning based on organization value: Project planning will transition from a task and deliverable focus to a focus on delivering organizational value.
Defined metrics and review process: Pre-defined metrics and gate review checkpoints are instituted, providing executive management with a “dashboard” of where the project stands at any point. Problems are identified and corrected before they impact the overall implementation schedule.
Improve scope management process: Project sponsors and decision makers will have an improved grasp on “scope creep” and avoid decisions that will negatively impact project ROI or schedule.
Improve team effectiveness: Project teams will unite behind business goals, rather than parochial interests and act as a seamless unit driving towards common objectives.
Improve communication: Team members will understand the current business objectives, and the project’s status against those objectives. Team members will feel ownership for the project’s success.
Prevoyance Group focuses solely on partnering with clients to help them complete their projects successfully. Rather than using these services as a means to sell large scale implementations, Prevoyance Group stringently maintains its role as a strategic partner, delivering the good news along with the bad. Our years of experience on projects of all shapes and sizes, both blockbuster successes and spectacular failures, provide the insight necessaryto make your project a success.
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